


Stars Come Down In You (Only Heaven Away)

by luninosity



Category: X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Fairy Tale Elements, Legends, Love, M/M, Old Married Couple, Storytelling, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-26
Updated: 2013-09-26
Packaged: 2017-12-27 17:34:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/981711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the island nation of Genosha, there’s a saying: Death always smiles at you twice.</p><p>The saying is, of course, entirely true.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stars Come Down In You (Only Heaven Away)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ninemoons42](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/gifts).



> Birthday fic for one of the loveliest people ever! 
> 
> Title from the Psychedelic Furs song “The Ghost In You.” Structure probably owes something to the last chapter of Terry Pratchett's _Nation_.

In the island nation of Genosha, there’s a saying: Death always smiles at you twice.  
  
Strangers often find this unnerving, when it’s said to comfort weeping children or as a laughing dare for foolish young men. Is it reassuring, is it enticing, to think that your death will come for you with a grin?  
  
But it is, say the mothers to their children. And they smile, too. And so do the children, when they run out to play in the forests and in city parks and in the flickers of firelight back safe at home. Because they believe that Death will be kind, and will gaze at them with blue eyes, and hold out a compassionate hand.  
  
The saying is, of course, entirely true.  
  
Every resident of the island nation of Genosha knows it is. They know all the stories before they ever meet Death for the first time.  
  
They grow up on those stories, folklore like bedrock, down in the bones of the land: Death, and the blue eyes of Death, and the kind hands for the elderly, and the cruel hands for the cruel. Death’s conversation with the Universe, one shoulder propped negligently against the door of Time, unafraid to bargain for the lives of humanity, to keep them short and rare and unique and brief, to let each person find an end and then start over somewhere new. Death’s sense of humor, which involves a few names for things that kids aren’t supposed to know about and therefore do know all about, in great detail. Death’s Consort.  
  
The story of Death’s Consort is a popular one. Every romantic schoolchild knows it. But they all, even the ones too carefully disinterested, listen every time it gets told. It’s a story about immortality; they all know that. It’s a story about mortality and loss; some of the best storytellers understand that. It’s a story about love, and academics have argued endlessly over the application and interpretation of the word.  
  
On this particular night, the two children spending the night in the forest are hearing it again, more or less. They’re currently being rained on, water splashing off the leaves and into their supposedly waterproof jackets, so they’re understandably a bit preoccupied. The world’s full of wet green scents and the sound of summer-shower dampness.  
  
“—and most scholars, you know, consider that the Consort needed to know all the loss, needed to endure all the pain and heartbreak of losing his family, and the, er, rather bloody vengeance he took on their killers, to truly understand the _meaning_ of love and death, and so the point of the story is _are you listening?”_  
  
“The point of the story is that they impress each other and fall in love.” The boy’s eying the trees, and they him, with mutual dislike. He prefers open spaces. Room to run. To explore his speed.  
  
“The _point_ ,” the girl says, rolling her eyes, “is that you can’t go home again, but you can make a new home. Find something new to love. The warrior becomes the Consort. We got it.” She’s also got green hair and a prickly, but not unfriendly, attitude.  
  
“The point of this particular story _on this particular night_ ,” says their other escort, the one who’s not their tutor, “is that you work together. Be a team. You come of age on this night. Survive it.”  
  
“We’re not going to die,” the girl says, with the assertion of an almost-teenager entirely convinced that the adults will be watching the stupid ritual from a heartbeat away. “You wouldn’t let us.”  
  
The boy, who’s looking at their faces, says, very quietly, “Wait…”  
  
“You think you know everything? I promise you do not. You have your tent, your provisions, and yourselves. Survive the night. The way your ancestors did. Tradition. Like the stories.”  
  
“We know,” says the girl. “You’re going to leave us here for Death to find. We’re not stupid.”  
  
The boy, slightly better at reading facial expressions, kicks her, but too late.  
  
“More or less, yes,” says their escort, and then both adults are simply gone. Teleported. Away.  
  
They look at each other, alone in the dripping forest, and try not to think about the words that bounce back at them from the trees. They _have_ just been left here. For Death to find.  
  
Around them is the silence of the forest, which is not silence at all. Full of creeping rustling sounds. Chatters and chirps and grunts. And the rain refuses to let up.  
  
“They wouldn’t let us die,” the girl proclaims, through the quiver in her voice. “Besides. We meet Death for the first time tonight, right? Neither of us has, y’know, seen him before. Right?”  
  
“Yeah….”  
  
“Right.”  
  
“Wanda?”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“Is there any rule about whether you can meet him twice in one night?”  
  
“…shut up.”  
  
“We could die in a lot of ways.”  
  
“I said shut up.”  
  
“Flash floods. Lightning. A tree could fall on us.”  
  
“Either start a fire or help me with the tent.”  
  
“The tent might collapse on us.”  
  
“It might not. Um…I don’t think it’s supposed to be that shape.”  
  
“There might be wolves.”  
  
“I’m feeding you to them first.”  
  
The fire goes out twice. The tent sags brokenly in the rain. They try reinforcing the sides with sticks, which accomplishes nothing except extra-all-encompassing muddiness.  
  
“Did you say something bad to it?”  
  
“No!”  
  
“Are you _sure?_ ”  
  
“No! I might have!”  
  
At this point a man wanders out of the trees, raindrops sparkling in his slightly too-long hair, catching in dark eyelashes, decorating a sweater that’s several grandfatherly decades out of style and not likely to remain fluffy for long. They both stare. He’s got extremely blue eyes.  
  
But he hops over a fallen log like any normal height-challenged human being might, muttering to himself about mutant foliage and inconvenient size discrepancies; he doesn’t seem to be carrying any supplies for a walk in the woods, much less for a soggy water-laden type of walk, but he leaves footprints, and he grins at them as if to say they’re all in this together, and he seems fairly harmless, as far as first impressions go.  
  
“Um,” the girl says, “do you want—it’s sort of raining, you know?”  
  
“Oh, yes, I know. Thank you, though, for thinking I might not’ve noticed. Very kind.”  
  
“Um…we’ve got a tent. If you want. It kind of sucks.”  
  
“It does? Oh…I see the problem. I’m not terribly mechanically inclined, though—” There’s a pause, and he glances around, and then repeats, as if someone _else_ might just be happening by in the depths of the woods in the middle of a dismally spitting half-hearted tempest, “I said _I’m_ not mechanically inclined.”  
  
The boy offers politely, because they’re supposed to be polite to any strangers they meet in the woods, any fairy-tale reader knows that, “We heard you the first time, please.”  
  
“Of course you did. That wasn’t meant for—never mind. You were in the middle of a story, though, before I arrived? Which one?”  
  
The innocence in that question suggests he’s already aware, but they answer anyway. He beams. “One of my absolute favorites. Did he tell you about the warrior? About how lovely his eyes are? They truly are. Beautiful.”  
  
“Um…no?”  
  
There’re some noises in the background, and a grumble that sounds like someone swearing in a foreign language. They almost turn around, but don’t because their visitor’s watching them, settled down on the companionable log and ignoring the misery of the weather, head tipped to one side. His eyes are really hypnotically blue. So very blue, in the green-grey-brown of the watercolor wood.  
  
“Pity, that. They always leave the detail out. Looking for the bigger picture, I suppose. And no one _ever_ gets the film adaptations right…this is your first night, correct? Both of you?”  
  
“We’re twins,” the boy says.  
  
“I’m older.”  
  
“By a _minute_.”  
  
“Still.”  
  
“A minute can be an eternity, you know. If you’re, say, a mayfly, or a goldfish. Or it can be the opposite…” That sentence sounds, not weary, but the other side of weariness: spoken as if the words know what exhaustion is, but also comprehend the joy of commitment. It’s complicated. The rain doesn’t help.  
  
“Um,” says the boy, “do you want…hot cocoa? Or a Snickers?”  
  
“A what?”  
  
“Chocolate? You know?” That tone says: if you’re a magical creature out of a fairy-tale, we’re not surprised you don’t know about Snickers, but you kind of really should anyway. I mean, _Snickers_.  
  
“Oh…no, thank you…you can keep your provisions. I think your tent has fixed itself; isn’t that marvelous?”  
  
They spin around. It not only has straightened out, but seems drier, and also shifted slightly to the left, away from the worst of the tree roots.  
  
A few leaves land in the blue-eyed visitor’s hair, which is somewhat odd because there’s not much wind, and he’s not directly under a branch. He brushes them away, and grins. “So, that story…I’ve got some time, and it’s been a while since I’ve heard someone else tell it. What did you think?”  
  
“Well…we’ve heard it before.”  
  
“It’s about getting what you want.”  
  
“No, it isn’t, it’s about getting what you need—”  
  
“He went looking for Death, and he fell in love with Death—”  
  
“But then he got to live forever, even after he did the awful things, after he killed all those people—”  
  
“But he didn’t _want_ to live forever—”  
  
“Ah. I see the problem.” They stop, and look at him. “Well,” he says, and tucks a foot up under him on the log, “you’re not wrong. But, you see, people can change their minds about what they want; and sometimes what you want and what you need can become, in the end, the same thing. Not always. But sometimes.”  
  
With the glee of a boy waiting to correct his elders upon returning home: “So…he was telling it wrong?”  
  
“He was telling it wrong _and_ right,” says the blue-eyed man cheerfully. “Is there tea?”  
  
There had not been any tea, but suddenly there is, a package of it plopping neatly into the dirt at their feet. Their visitor laughs, says, “All right, then,” and scoops it up, unwraps it, proceeds to steep leaves in a borrowed thermos of hot water with all the apparent unconcern of a man in an elegant restaurant. The twins wonder whether they should tell him about the possible flash-floods and lightning-storms and forest-wolves.  
  
“What did you mean,” the girl says, giving up, “wrong and right?”  
  
“Ah.” He takes a sip, curls hands around the warm thermos, looks contentedly reflective. “Well. The facts were certainly correct. The warrior went in search of Death, that much is true. After his family was slaughtered, and so brutally, he vowed to spend his life hunting down the killers, and that was a vow he kept. Bloodily.”  
  
“That’s in the story. He killed a lot of people.”  
  
“Don’t interrupt!”  
  
“He did, yes.” The blue eyes gaze down into the tea as if looking for words; finding them, perhaps, in a swirl of leaves, a drift of steam, they resume. “The warrior was…very lonely, and very lost, without his tribe, with his vengeance complete but his soul so unfulfilled…he was desperately unhappy. And he’d done terrible things, you see, to others and to himself. He wanted his revenge, and he got it, and he looked at himself after he’d done so, and he saw all the red on his hands, and he was exhausted. But he was brave, and he was strong, and so he made up his mind to go on one last quest, to find Death for himself…”  
  
“We _know_ that much.”  
  
“Oh, of course you do, sorry. This is the part you don’t know, however…Death was very lonely as well, back then. Watching from a distance, always watching…always there, and never wanted—well, hardly ever, and then in rather unhappy circumstances. Often feared. Sometimes greeted as a friend. But never loved. And to have that sort of power, to look at a man or a woman and know when that person’s days would end…to send everyone on, and never follow…to never have anyone stay…”  
  
There’s an abrupt tense quiver from the trees, and they all look up. The boy and girl can’t see any source, but the blue-eyed man smiles at his miraculously-appearing tea as if in reply.  
  
“They always tell you that Death’s Consort was a great warrior,” he says. “That Death loved him for his strength, and for his knowledge of, well, death. As it were.”  
  
“But he didn’t?”  
  
“Well, not precisely. Or not entirely. Strength is always appreciated…” With a smile; some private joke, not meant to be shared. “But it was something else, then. The warrior looked at Death, and began to demand that Death take him, end his life, end the world if he had to, to make the pain and rage go away. But he stopped.”  
  
In the pause, the boy asks, because someone has to, “Why?”  
  
“Because…he was very alone. And when he demanded that Death raise a sword to his throat—we used swords, back then, not guns—he saw the terrible loneliness in Death’s eyes. And he caught the sword with one hand, and asked Death to wait. Because they were the same, and because he saw that it would hurt Death to kill him, and so he couldn’t ask.”  
  
“Because he changed his mind?”  
  
“Because he was strong enough to change his mind. When he knew it would hurt another person. He asked to stay, to not move on. To keep Death from being lonely…He saved Death from hurt. And that’s the story you know: Death fell in love with him because he was the strongest of them all.”  
  
“Charles,” says an exasperatedly amused voice from the shadows, “you cannot possibly claim that you’re telling it right, either. Honestly.”  
  
“I _am_.”  
  
“No, you’re not.” The newcomer, long and lean and built of coiled muscle like the stories of ancient heroes, and dressed in thoroughly modern jeans and leather jacket, stops leaning against the tree where he’s all at once been there all along, and comes over and puts said jacket around the shoulders of their storyteller, who scowls at him merrily. “You tell it, then. Otherwise don’t critique mine.”  
  
“Well, if you’re going to tell it _wrong_ —” The now-named Charles pokes him in the ribs, hard, and he laughs and kisses the hand, and then wraps himself around Charles on the log. There’s an old scar slicing across the palm of one long-fingered hand; they can see it when he touches fingers to a freckled cheek. “You feel cold.”  
  
“I enjoy feeling the cold once in a while. It’s an interesting sensation.”  
  
“It won’t be when you give yourself frostbite. And don’t say frostbite is interesting, either.”  
  
“No, but it would be _intriguing_ , it’s been a few centuries—”  
  
“Charles, quiet.” This evidently works, though not without a retaliatory tiny kick to the newcomer’s ankle, a tactic the twins observe with some smug satisfaction. “So. Pay attention.”  
  
“We’re not five years old.”  
  
“Yes, Erik, they’re not five years old.”  
  
“What did I just tell you? And they look bored. That one’s tapping his toes.”  
  
The toe-tapping stops instantly. Charles, on the other hand, says happily, “You told me you love me.”  
  
“Hmm. It’s true about the warrior and Death and falling in love—Charles, stop grinning at me like that, you’re very distracting—but it was the other way around. When the warrior was seeking his own end, he looked into those blue eyes, and he saw Death, yes. And he saw someone who wept for him, on his behalf, who knew every terrible deed he’d ever done, and still would mourn his loss. Someone who kissed him, and told him that he wasn’t alone.”  
  
“There’s kissing in this story?”  
  
“Yes, Erik, is there kissing in this story?”  
  
“ _Yes_. There _was_. And no one objected, as I recall, and it was perfect. And so…Charles, you really ought to learn to tell it right. He stayed for Death, but Death saved him first.”  
  
“Oh, Erik,” Charles says. “There’s likely to be more kissing, in the very near future.”  
  
“Extremely near, if we leave now.”  
  
“Oh, but—”  
  
“They’ve had the traditional encounter, yes? And they know what they’re doing. They’ll be fine. _You_ need to get out of the rain.”  
  
“It’s not as if I can actually expire, myself, I don’t think that would even—”  
  
“You’ll be miserable, and you’ll make my life miserable. The last time you had a cold you were cranky for two decades.”  
  
“I was _not_.”  
  
“I was there. Do you want a repeat of the fourteenth century? Or, even more so, the fourth?”  
  
Charles sighs. Lets himself be pulled to his feet. “Would you especially _like_ to revisit the era of your questionable purple togas and personal name choices, what was it, _Magnus_?” Punctuated with a kiss, though, stretching up on tiptoes to bring their lips together, bodies pressed close under the susurration of the rain. Erik—previously Magnus?— appears to be effectively silenced by this.  
  
“Good. Then we know nothing about the fourth century whatsoever. We’re so sorry, we’d love to stay longer, but, well, you’ve had the traditional—and he’s very insistent when it comes to my welfare, even after all these years—”  
  
“I’m also very insistent about kissing you. _After_ we’re indoors.”  
  
“Yes, we’re going now—oh, one last thing, sorry again—don’t let it get around that Erik turned up for this, will you, otherwise he’ll have to admit that he likes hearing the stories and that’s not really part of his image—”  
  
“Charles, I’ve paid actual money for an expensive hotel room. Human money. Because you said you wanted to, for fun. And, by the way, no one uses gold anymore.”  
  
“They don’t? Oh, well. Both of you…have an excellent first night, and I’ll see you again—though not for quite some time in either case—”  
  
“You’re not supposed to tell them that!”  
  
“They look so concerned—”  
  
“ _Confused_ , Charles. They look confused.”  
  
“Damn. Sorry! I don’t think I’m supposed to swear in front of children, Erik’s a terrible influence—”  
  
“I am n—all right, that one’s probably true.”  
  
“We’re very sorry. Listen: you know the saying?”  
  
Heads nod, in wordless unison.  
  
“Good. So you know the way that you…you meet Death the first time, you smile and greet Death once on your first night, so that when he comes for you the second time he’ll come as a friend. Right?”  
  
More nods.  
  
“Well, then. Er…this is once. I do apologize, we’re normally better organized than this, but it’s been a rather busy few weeks with so _many_ first nights and other, er, appointments, and Erik decided to come along and enforce the holiday because he thinks I need it— _yes_ , love, coming, where and when on earth did you pick up gloves my size, I hope you paid for those in whatever time you popped over into—”  
  
Both figures vanish in an intricate shimmer of air, a motion that suggests both a simple walk into raindrops and an infinitely complex celestial transition. They’re holding hands as they go.  
  
The boy and girl look at the air for a while, and then at each other. The rain splashes giddily down around them, in the clearing. Them, and their repaired tent, and their first night. Coming of age.  
  
“So,” the girl says, eventually.  
  
“So…”  
  
“Well, the point is that we won’t be afraid of them, isn’t it?”  
  
“Could _anyone_ be afraid of _them_?”  
  
“I think yes.” She scuffs a shoe in the damp dirt, thoughtfully. “They could kill you. And I don’t mean just because he’s Death, and the other one’s—”  
  
“Erik?”  
  
“A barbarian from the dawn of time or whatever. I mean they look like they’ve seen some…stuff. You know. Things.”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“I guess they would have. Seen things.”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“But they look happy.”  
  
“Yeah. _Kissing_.”  
  
“They hold hands,” the girl says, and grins at the rain, at the future, at the years ahead, “and they _both_ smile.”


End file.
